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Talk:Confederate Instrument of Surrender
"After Morrell read the terms, Partridge signed it. Incredibly, while he realized much of the instrument was victor's justice, he did not realize that by signing it, he'd given up his country's sovereignty. He was immediately taken into custody." Turtledove told us Partridge was stupid every time he turned around. The only time he showed us this was in the one goddamned scene where we were supposed to take Partridge seriously. That's almost as "incredible" as Partridge not realizing he'd just dissolved his country. But then, in the last few years of TL-191, incredibilities like that were fairly commonplace. Turtle Fan 23:59, January 16, 2010 (UTC) :As I recall, Partridge first read the document before he signed it causing Morrell to think he wasn't as dumb as people thought. Also, in the one previous appearance with Jake, he seemed to be an earnest, good ol' boy and not too sharp. ML4E 19:32, January 17, 2010 (UTC) ::Reading before signing should be a rather minimal requirement for not being an imbecile and naive but of course it's not as common as you'd think. In fact just a few months ago I was remembering the insult given when a certain individual, among other things, gave me something to sign and described it as being other than it was. On reading it I refused to sign and wondered what sort of fool he took me for to think I'd fall for that. Still, he didn't realize that he'd just dissolved his country even though he'd read it! Granted it didn't say flat-out "I hereby dissolve my country," but it wasn't exactly hidden either. ::The scene where Partridge tells a traveling salesman joke, in RE I think it was--I believe that's the only other scene in which he appeared. You could tell he wouldn't exactly be able to help FitzBelmont engineer atomic fission, but stupidity didn't seem to be his dominant characteristic then. Actually in retrospect the way HT wrote that scene reminds me of how he wrote Joe Bauman--a man of low-average intelligence who did his best with what he had. Turtle Fan 20:18, January 17, 2010 (UTC) July 14 is Bastille Day.... But nothing of import appears to have happened that day in OTL that relates to either the ACW or WWII. I guess HT can skip the tweedoms every so often. TR (talk) 23:23, February 20, 2013 (UTC) ::1861: Horace Greeley's first "On to Richmond!" headline. (That might have mattered if US hadn't already taken Richmond at this point in the story.) ::1862: US Navy begins its prohibition of liquor aboard warships. ::1863: A number of Union cities, most notably Boston, MA, experience their first day of draft riots. ::1864: At the Battle of Tupelo, Mississippi, Nathan Bedford Forrest is defeated on the battlefield on the first of only two occasions. (HT might have found that one interesting.) ::1933: All political parties other than the National Socialist Party are officially outlawed in Germany; also, the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring is passed, allowing the Nazis to mandate compulsory sterilization of anyone suffering from a congenital defect. ::1941: Germans bomb Suez; the Vichy French Foreign Legion outpost in Damascus surrenders and gives its parole to the Allies; Charles de Gaulle gives a speech urging the United States to join the Allies openly. ::1945: American battleships enter artillery range of the Japanese Home Islands and begin bombardments. :If HT had honed in on any of the above my guess would be the outlawing of opposition parties in Germany; but none of that is really at all compelling, is it? He may have chosen the date for Bastille Day, but yeah, a departure from the norm is welcome. :Now that you mention it I'm reminded of an exchange on the Crappy Board way, way back in the day (I believe this was the winter between RE and DttE, so before TL-191's quality dropped off precipitously, and parallelism ran roughshod over common sense) in which Darwin suggested that the war would end on April 9, 1945. He may have had some pretty strange ideas about the role of the British Empire in North America, and he may have been touchy as all hell, but he knew how the game was played when it came to things like that. Turtle Fan (talk) 03:16, February 21, 2013 (UTC)